Honor MagicBook 16 (2022)

Honor upgrades the screen and the processor to create a superb-value choice – if you want a 16in laptop

- TIM DANTON

The 144Hz display is as good as you’ll see at this price

PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from hihonor.com

If there’s one question that Honor laptops ask, it’s this: why pay more? So it is once again with this 2022 update to the 16in MagicBook, available from early April, which packs a cracking amount of power into its 16in metal-bodied frame. I defy you to find a laptop that offers so much for £850.

Let’s start with the power, which stems from AMD’s six-core Ryzen 5 5600H processor. This is last year’s technology, but few people are going to complain at the speed this brilliant chip tears through tasks. A score of 266 in PC Pro’s benchmarks is sensational for a sub-£1,000 laptop, as is a 8,699 result in Cinebench R23’s multicore test.

The 512GB SSD isn’t a bottleneck either, with sustained transfer speeds of 2,860MB/sec for writes and 2,931MB/sec for reads. If you need more capacity, it’s a matter of removing ten Torx screws and prising off the bottom panel: the M.2 SSD slot is right in front of you, as is the Wi-Fi 6E card. You can’t upgrade the 16GB of RAM, as it’s soldered onto the motherboard.

There’s only one area of weakness when it comes to performance, and that’s gaming. Honor relies on AMD’s integrated Radeon Vega graphics, which is only capable of high frame rates in older games such as Dirt: Showdown; it averaged 79fps at High settings at 1080p. When I stepped up the challenge with Metro: Last Light it mustered 37fps at High settings.